Carter Beats the Devil (65 page)

“Jake, you sound like you’re from New York City.”

“Naw. Lowah East Side.”

The audience roared, as it always did at children’s misconceptions. Jake looked out at them as if he’d remember each and every one of their faces and take his revenge later.

“What are you doing in California, Jake?”

“I got az-mer.”

More laughter, which Carter hadn’t wanted. He’d created this illusion to make a child happy to be onstage. It was vital to turn the tide in Jake’s favor.

“Jake, let’s teach you some magic to keep that asthma from bothering you, shall we?”

. . .

Phoebe Kyle was in the wings, listening, standing by the handrail, using it for balance. Onstage, Carter was teaching the boy how to hold a deck of cards “just like a magician does.” But no matter how he gripped the deck, Jake couldn’t make a card jump out the way Carter could. Just as it seemed Jake was about to become upset, Carter reassured him that magic was a long-term process, that practice and perseverance were the keys.

“I have every confidence in you. You must practice and practice and practice till sore. Only then are you ready to practice once more,” Carter half-said, half-chanted.

Phoebe heard someone treading lightly behind her. There had been light treads all evening long, so she paid this little attention until there was a hand at her elbow.

“Are you Miss Phoebe Kyle?” A young man’s whisper. “Western Union,” he whispered. “Telegram.”

“Telegram?” The word seemed no more real when she said it. In fact, it seemed unlikely. “For me?”

“Mr. Ledocq, he pointed you out.”

She felt him putting a piece of paper in her hand. “What does it say?”

He shrugged. “We don’t read ’em, ma’am.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m blind. Can you read it to me?” She passed it back to him.

“Oh.” A rustling. “Huh. There’s some mistake here. It’s blank.” He passed it back to her. “Sorry about that.” He turned on his heel with a squeak and trotted off.

Onstage, Carter was saying, “Jake, you’re ready for the next step, I think.”

Phoebe, who had many fears generally, was terrified by the idea of someone sending her a blank telegram. She held it like it was an envelope filled with scorpions, and then hesitantly she touched her fingertips to it. What she found made her more frightened: it wasn’t blank at all. It was Braille.

. . .

“Now, Jake, cards are very difficult to practice with. So I’m going to move on to magic you can perform excellently and immediately. What do you say, sport?”

Jake nodded. Carter paid him close attention: he was patient, and serious, and hadn’t yet cracked a smile. When he’d planned illusions for this show, Carter’s earliest designs were scenarios for two small boys in a snowstorm, learning magic tricks, but raw autobiography never satisfies when half-disguised as entertainment—the important part was that, as a boy, he’d wanted to perform incredible illusions quickly. He engineered an effect that could turn a child into a sorcerer instantly.

An assistant wearing a fez—Albert—carried a table onstage and placed it near Carter. On the table was a bundle draped in velvet.

“This is the easiest type of magic to do right the first time.” Carter unwrapped the bundle and held the contents aloft in both his hands. “Throwing knives at a living target.”

The curtain went up, showing off a set designed to look like Carter’s study. Piles of books, the suit of armor from his last show, ancient lithographs and animal heads mounted on the walls. To the far left was a scholarly-looking desk on which there was a wise-looking stuffed owl. Behind the desk, along the wall, framed portraits of some of Carter’s fellow magicians.

Carter took off his jacket and draped it over a coatrack just as Willie wheeled a backdrop painted with imps and devils on stage. “So, here are your knives. I’ll stand right here and you throw them at me.” Carter positioned himself against the backdrop, legs spread and arms akimbo.

Jake stood in the middle of the stage, uncertain what was expected of him. The table piled with knives was right behind him. He took in a shallow breath, a terrible little wheeze.

A second later, Carter exclaimed, “What am I doing! I’m sorry, Jake, I didn’t prepare you for this, did I?” He left the backdrop and went down on one knee, right next to Jake. “This could have been very dangerous if
I hadn’t done this.” He took out a blindfold and showed it, both sides. The audience rumbled, half with laughter, half with horror, so Carter took the opportunity to murmur, “Young man, you won’t hurt me. No matter what you do, it’s magic. I promise.”

“Okay.” Jake looked toward Carter trustingly, just like that. Carter wanted to hug him. He secured the blindfold around Jake’s eyes so that its point hung down below his chin.

Carter returned to his pose, and, seeming to realize Jake couldn’t find the knives when blindfolded, clapped twice. The assistant with the fez came to the boy’s side.

“Just let your arm follow Albert’s,” Carter called out. “Just let it go limp, and he’ll guide you.”

Albert’s hand wrapped around Jake’s, which was wrapped around the butt of the knife, then Jake’s arm went back once, twice, and with the old heave-ho of a baseball pitcher, he threw with all of his might, right at Carter. There was a muffled impact, and a spotlight swept the stage for a few moments, finally discovering that Jake’s first knife had gone considerably wide, in fact hitting a glossy, framed photo of Thurston square in the forehead.

There was considerable laughter from the front of the house. Carter called, “Albert, those
are
the magic knives, aren’t they?”

When it was confirmed that the knives were indeed magic, Jake was given a second chance. With Albert’s arm guiding his, Jake’s next throw hit the backdrop against which Carter stood, right between his elbow and his body. Carter was the first to applaud. “Very good. Keep going!” he cried.

Jake’s next four throws hit outside the knee, inside the knee, by the upstage elbow, and the last one popped a balloon Carter held in his teeth. Each of the impacts was accompanied by shrieks from the house—they generally diminished, save for a man in the seven-dollar seats who laughed himself into such red-faced hysteria that Carter actually addressed him from the stage. “Sir, I don’t know you, but I invite you to attend every one of my shows from now on.”

By the time the illusion was over, Jake was certainly not ready to leave the stage. Because Carter knew children delighted in the mess of it, he and Jake baked a cake in a man’s hat. A great fog of flour spread into the audience while Jake’s friends laughed the deep guffaws of children.

The finale of the first act, in which an upright piano was rolled onto the stage, was one Carter had birthed through sheer stubbornness, as
Ledocq thought it was crazy. “You put a piano onstage, you vanish it! You
must
vanish it! You must not”—his hands flew in the air as if describing exploding popcorn—“it’s a disaster.”

Carter had said, “Anyone can make a piano vanish.”

When the piano was in place, Carter asked Jake if he knew how to play.

“Nah,” Jake rasped. With a few tricks under his belt, he seemed as virile as a cowboy.

“Are you sure? Have you had lessons?”

Jake shook his head.

“Have you ever played on a magic piano? No? Jake, have a seat on the bench there. Good lad. Can you reach the pedals?” His feet were in fact a good foot away from the floor. Carter spread his hands out on the keyboard. “Just move your hands on the keys. Give it a try.”

Jake tentatively touched down his fingers on a few keys. It didn’t sound particularly magic.

“Thank you, Jake. Now, be a good boy and play something for me, say, a nice, slow piece. It’s all right, go ahead.” Jake fished for a key or two and looked up in astonishment as the piano began to make the most beautiful sounds. A nocturne.

“Hey!” His face twisted in delight.

“Very good. Familiar, too, isn’t that Chopin?”

“Yeah?” Jake looked up at him.

“Keep moving your hands.” Carter asked Jake for a waltz and a rag, both of which he played impeccably. Just as the audience was sensing the kind of fraud it might be, Carter tugged loose the piano’s paneling to show off the absence of a printed roll—this wasn’t a player piano. He called for requests. Audience members called out for Irving Berlin tunes, then the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Lost in the Moonlight.” But then someone called out for Liszt, and when Carter said this aloud, the piano began to play the
Benediction
that Sarah had played for him long ago, and Carter was pulled into his past. He saw two beautiful women running upstairs, hand-in-hand, and felt a dog putting her chin on his hand. He had woken up to discover the love of his life. He snapped back to the present, and he felt the demonstration had gone on long enough.

“Jake,” he said, “you’ve become an excellent magician in twenty minutes, which is only twenty years less than it took me to reach adequacy.” As he spoke, he accepted a rolled-up purple velvet cloak from Willie.
“We’re going to send you back into the world with all the arcane knowledge of the mystic arts at your disposal, but there’s one more illusion you have to master before you can take my place here onstage.”

“Can I throw the knives again?”

“You never repeat anything onstage,” he said, and Jake nodded. They were having a conversation in front of two thousand people. How easy it was for a child if he was made comfortable. “No, the skill I’m talking about is defeating the ordinary. For instance, here—” He gave the cloak a violent shake that scattered flower petals across the stage, and then he held it stiffly to his side, like a matador, and removed it—revealing a beautiful, smiling woman. She was dressed in a blue-sequined silk dress that ended just below the knee—not above, as Carter did not run that kind of show. She waved to the audience.

“See, Jake, that was unexpected. I struck a blow against the ordinary. This is my assistant, Madame Esperanza.” Carter took her by the hand and paraded her across the apron. He called over his shoulder, “Now, young man, go to the piano bench and open it up and bring me what you find.”

All eyes were on Jake as he opened the bench and tugged at something. It took him two hands, but eventually he withdrew a long, heavy crosscut saw, a saw that stood almost as tall as he did. When he turned downstage to show it off, its lower end dragged on the boards. It was a two-man sort of saw.

Carter took it from Jake and stood it on its end. They made a pretty line-up just in front of the footlights: Jake, Carter, the saw, Esperanza.

“Jake, what would an ordinary magician do with that saw?”

“He’d saw the lady in half.”

“In halves, yes. Exactly! Now, you must
never
be ordinary. That’s the rule.” And here was where Carter put into effect his odd little idea. Silently he thanked his mother for her insistence that he never saw through a girl—he’d been forced to think up something far more interesting. He explained that many magicians vanished pianos, and that this, too, was ordinary. But how ordinary was sawing a piano in halves?

“First, let’s give the saw to Willie, shall we?” On cue, Willie walked in from the wings, and took the saw in hand.

“Second, we’ll make sure Esperanza is out of harm’s way. Wave good-bye, Esperanza.”

Esperanza, still smiling, waved to the audience as Carter threw the cloak over her and drew it away. The whole motion took less than a
heartbeat, but she had disappeared. The applause was approving but also expectant: something was coming next.

Willie took the saw and walked to the far end of the piano. Carter said, “Now, Jake, I need your help. Please hold this wand. Stand right here, back up a few feet, excellent. Now watch carefully. When I give the signal, you must wave the wand, all right?”

Jake nodded. He was intent now. Carter felt like he’d made a lifelong apprentice. Willie brought the saw across the piano top, and waited.

Then, with the audience completely enrapt—was he actually going to saw it in halves?—Carter took one end of the saw, and Willie the other, and together they began to work it vigorously back and forth across the cherrywood surface atop the piano, and feathers of sawdust caught the lights, then fell to the floor.

It was indeed a bizarre sight to behold, magician and assistant pushing and pulling the great silver saw, and the audience at first laughed, for the performers looked quite awkward. But then the sound of the saw changed from a gritty and light kind of friction, to something far more distinct as the teeth points burned across metal parts. It was the sound of chaos at work: strings cut asunder, pinging like shot cords, then huge internal, muffled crashes, the collapsing of hammers and a spray of ivory chips as Carter brought the saw through the keyboard itself. By the time the saw was nearly through the piano’s bottom foot, the laughter had changed to applause and full-throated cheers, and when the piano was separated in two halves, its rent guts gleaming under the lights, the Orpheum went wild.

Carter surveyed the audience, fighting back the urge to wipe his brow, for sawing a piano in halves had caused him to work up a certain perspiration. Considered from the audience point of view, all that work was destructive and yet strangely exhilarating. He heard whistles and happy noises, and he took a moment to beam. He had a simple fact at hand that Ledocq, a European, hadn’t accounted for: if young Charles Carter had hated his piano lessons there was a fine chance that most of his audience had, too.

Then, over the piano, he threw a large grey silken sheet, a sheet he’d chosen for how it fell into place slowly, catching every air current, and he called, “Jake, quickly, your wand!”

Jake waved it, and Carter pulled away the sheet, showing off the newly restored piano, on top of which Esperanza now sat, dipping her arms into a basket of brilliant red rose petals, and flinging them, a
crimson snowstorm, into the fully excited house. The applause was deafening, people even standing up to applaud, and the orchestra struck up a chorus of “Roses, Glorious Roses.” The curtain dropped on the first act.